Sundays With Noel

There was a time when Noel Parmentel, an occasional contributor to this journal, who died lately, used to name me practically each Sunday. I’d choose up the telephone and listen to, in his gravelly voice: “Lingeman? Noel.”

I wasn’t at all times comfortable to have my Sundays thus interrupted however wanting again I’m glad he dropped the dime. What did we discuss? Most likely gossip about doings at The Nation and literary issues typically. Noel was well-read. I bear in mind him as soon as telling me to put off a sure one that, he mentioned quoting Graham Greene, was a member of the “non-torturable class.” Noel and I have been members of the identical technology of aspirers who invaded New York within the sixties hell-bent on making a reputation for ourselves. There was a enterprise component in Noel’s and my relationship, after all. Eventually, he would dangle an article concept earlier than me like a lion tamer waving a steak earlier than considered one of his expenses. Noel knew what he was doing. He was a professional and a helluva author. Right here’s a free pattern of his prose fashion lopped from a bit he wrote for us a couple of grifter named Stew Leonard, titled “The Skim Rip-off at Stew’s Dairy.”

“Stew Leonard’s judgment day is ready for October 20 in Federal District Courtroom in New Haven, the place Fairfield County’s huge butter and egg man (now the heavy in a lightweight opera bouffe Gotterdammerrung) will study his destiny. On recommendation of counsel—Watergate prosecutor James Neal—Leonard copped a plea of ‘conspiring to defraud the Federal Authorities of taxes on $17.5 million’ that he and three Norwalk co-defendants skimmed from the World’s Largest Dairy Retailer. Pointers name for as much as 5 years of jail time on prime of an already levied $15 million wonderful. Within the absence of divine intervention, Leonard will likely be buying and selling down his Holstein glad rags for Danbury pin stripes. Previous MacDonald by no means had days like this.”

Now that, J-school grads, is a lede!

So, our Sabbath talks weren’t in useless. A few of his greatest concepts ended up as articles in in The Nation.

However maintain on, I hear you saying. Wasn’t Noel a conservative contributor to Invoice Buckley’s Nationwide Evaluate?

True sufficient. However Noel was politically ambidextrous. As considered one of his pals, the author Dan Wakefield, put it, he “savaged the proper within the pages of The Nation, would flip round and do the identical to the left in Nationwide Evaluate and blasted each side in Esquire, and everybody cherished it.” As for his politics, he outlined himself as a “reactionary individualist.”

His former lover and mentee, the novelist Joan Didion, mentioned it extra caustically: “He belonged to nothing, He was an outsider who lived by his skill to control the within.”

Along with being an aesthetic author, Noel had the deal-making instincts of a shark literary agent. Add to that the truth that he was an enabler, a beneficiant motivator of fellow writers. When he and Didion have been an merchandise, he pushed her into ending her first novel, Run River. After they broke up finally dropped her, he mounted her up with John Gregory Dunne, then a author for Time, whom she later married. The pair emigrated to the left coast, the place they turned in-demand screenwriters.

Noel himself had nice expertise and originality as {a magazine} author. Certainly, an article he printed in Esquire, was what drew me and, I believe, Victor Navasky, The Nation’s editor on the time, to solicit his prose. It was a satirical sendup of the Younger People for Freedom, a cabal of pimply younger conservatives, titled “The Zits and the Ecstasy.”

It now happens to me that even amid the political stresses of the sixties and seventies, Noel and I, might speak to one another throughout fault traces. Maybe there’s a lesson there for at the moment’s literati.